Federal Regulation 49 CFR §77 (“part 77”) establishes standards and notification requirements for objects affecting navigable airspace. This notification serves as the basis for evaluating the effect of the construction or alteration on operating procedures. In addition, notification under part 77 is used in determining the potential hazardous effect of the proposed construction on air navigation, identifying mitigating measures to enhance safe air navigation, and charting of new objects. Information on the part 77 standard and process (including the forms) is contained on the FAA website.
Notification allows the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to identify potential aeronautical hazards in advance thus preventing or minimizing the adverse impacts to the safe and efficient use of navigable airspace.
Under 49 CFR §77.13—Any person/organization who intends to sponsor construction or alterations must notify the Administrator of the FAA. The construction and alterations include any construction or alteration exceeding 200 ft above ground level, or any construction or alteration within 20,000 ft of a public use or military airport which exceeds a 100:1 surface from any point on the runway, within 10,000 ft of a public use or military airport which exceeds a 50:1 surface from any point on the runway, or within 5,000 ft of a public use heliport which exceeds a 25:1 surface. In addition, the FAA should be notified under part 77 for the construction or alteration of any highway, railroad or other traverse way whose prescribed adjusted height would exceed that above noted standards, when requested by the FAA, or for any construction or alteration located on a public use airport or heliport regardless of height or location.
Persons failing to comply with the provisions of FAR Part 77 are subject to Civil Penalty under Section 902 of the Federal Aviation Act of 1958, as amended and pursuant to 49 USC §46301(a). Proposals that are subject to the above must file whether the proposed modification in on or off of airport property. On-Airport evaluations are administered by the FAA Airports Division, with coordinated assistance from Flight Procedures, Airway Facilities and Air Traffic Divisions. Off-Airport evaluations are administered by the FAA Air Traffic Division.
Airports that have received federal funds have an obligation through grant assurances to identify and mitigate hazards to navigable airspace at their airport. Construction or alteration of objects on or around airports can have an adverse impact to operations at an airport. These may include construction of objects may result in an increase to approach minimums to runways, the location of constructed objects may impact runway protection zones, safety areas, object free areas and obstacle free zones, and the transmitting frequency of the proposed facility which may impact the proper operation of navigational aide facilities at an airport.
In considering the vested interest airport owners have in the airport infrastructure, it is prudent for owners to protect the airspace around the airport. All modifications, whether permanent or temporary, are subject to the notice requirement outlined above. Airport owners/operators should assure that all such improvements are properly evaluated by the FAA prior to commencement of the work.
The FAA paperwork requirements under 49 CFR §77 are thus quite extensive. One of these requirements is the land use compatibility survey or study. At many airports, the land use compatibility process involves the use of paper maps, a ruler, and a calculator. For example, a cellular telephone provider will call the noise officer and inquire as to whether or not a cell tower can be erected at a specific latitude/longitude location.
The noise officer may then have to refer to the projected 65 or 70 DNL noise contours for the airport, for ten, fifteen, or twenty years from the present date. A structure such as a cell tower has minimal environmental impact and is not considered residential, so its placement may be relatively independent of an airport's contour maps. However, the noise officer may have to compute whether the proposed structure violates FAA's obstruction clearance criteria as set out in FAA's standard for obstacle clearance zones (Part 77) as discussed above.
As one might expect, the Part 77 standard is well defined by FAA and is designed to protect the integrity of signals emanating from airport landing aids and to provide sufficient margin for approaching or departing aircraft. The problem is that it is fairly complex and time consuming to be computed manually. A need exists in the art to assist airport operators and managers in preparing the necessary land use compatibility materials and forms for compliance with 49 CFR §77.
Previous techniques to monitor and estimate passenger flow at airports did not account for key items of data, such as the number of passengers onboard each aircraft. Preston Aviation and Megadata Corporation jointly marketed a solution that included 4-dimensional modeling as well as aircraft position in the terminal area. This approach lacked several data items including the actual number of passengers on the aircraft as well as the aircraft's actual position on the airport surface after it had landed.
Other systems use some real time data as well as forecast data such as the PlanFlow system. This system interfaces with data from a number of different systems to support its modeling features. These include Bag Conversion Data, Flight Schedules and Passenger Forecasts, Flight Events, Passenger Transfer Manifests (PTMs) SMPT Data, and Live BSM Data. Both the Bag Conversion Data and Passenger Forecast data are provided by Real Time's Resource Management System, FirstPlanIT. The limitations of this approach are the forecast data, which may not be accurate to account for the many real time influences on air traffic control, such as weather or other operational events. In addition, the approach assumes access to certain airline manifest information, which may or may not be available at any particular airport or for certain carriers.
Some vendors have attempted to provide passenger flow prediction based on the fusion of a number of different airport data sources. The system built by Switch stores a number of airport parameters in a centralized database server and attempts to predict passenger counts based on these external parameters. The system has no means of actually determining the number of passengers on board each aircraft.
Systems developed for other modes of transportation such as transit and bus terminals count passengers mechanically or use passive infrared sensors placed at ingress and egress points. This information calibrates models that are used to help allocate resources, determine passenger delays and passenger throughput. The system sold by Infodev provides passenger flow and other information to public transit operators to help support intelligent transportation systems. These systems help transit operators allocate resources, determine use, and measure performance. However, these systems do not work in real-time.
A number of commercial and shareware applications support the decoding of ACARS data from radios. The company AirNavSystems has software that allows the user to download ACARS data through the sound card in a PC. This software can only listen to only one ACARS frequency at time and is designed for the aviation enthusiast. The data does contain positional information that can be plotted on a map but this data is not refreshed frequently. AirNavSystems does have software that shows simulated aircraft at the airport but this application is designed to provide more realistic backgrounds for MS Flight Simulator 2004 and for accurate aircraft and passenger tracking.
A number of shareware software is available to download and interpret ACARS data. Examples of such shareware software includes WACARS, JACARS, Flight1, as well as others. These programs all have the capability to download and interpret ACARS data but are designed for and supported by aviation enthusiasts. These applications do not attempt to provide anything more than entertainment and have no specific business purpose or function.